Fallout 76

So close, and yet…

I screwed up. I’ve been wanting to play Fallout 4 again, but I’m waiting for the next-gen refresh, which is supposedly due “this year.” Fallout 76 is an MMO by Bethesda, which are the same people that do Elder Scrolls Online, which I’ve played a lot of. Even though I’ve loved the Fallout series, I had avoided it when it came out because of terrible reviews, but it was free on the PlayStation Plus collection, so I finally gave it a try.

I was up till 3 am.

Fallout 76 has a difficult time feeling like an MMO. If you run across the map in ESO, you’ll always run into a lot of people. In 76, you can go hours without running into anyone. If you look at the “social” menu on the map, there are usually less than a dozen people listed in the entire instance. That’s just not enough people playing to make it interesting as a multi-player game.

There are in-map “events” which are kind of like ESO dungeons. There are out-of-map “expeditions,” which are kind of like trials. In ESO, you have to queue and wait your turn to run a dungeon, because it’s a very popular thing to do. Half of the events on 76 expire because no one is doing them. The screenshot above shows the most people I’ve ever seen at one time on the server, still, 35 levels later.

If you look on the Steam charts, ESO has like 16K people playing all the time. FO76 has about half that. And that’s for PC. Player counts on consoles are usually about half of those numbers, for both platforms. Combined with this is how they do world/instance provisioning. However, it works out, there are usually only a dozen or so people in any particular instance of 76, compared to hundreds in ESO. (Apparently, the Xbox version has cross play with PC, so that would work better, but that — especially after Bethesda’s acquisition by Microsoft — will never come to Playstation.)

As with ESO (and probably all MMO’s) inventory management is a pain. Like ESO, the monthly subscription includes a bottomless container to hold all your resources, and that alone makes it worth the price.

It’s much simpler than ESO, as there are no classes. Fallout has seven stats, to allocate 56 skill points, and you pick perk card “skills” to go along with the stats you choose to boost. You can easily swap out different allotments of skill points and stacks of perk cards. This part seems really, really nice compared to leveling a main and managing alts for each class in ESO. (Of course, that is a critical part of ESO’s in-game economy, but I digress.)

Unfortunately, I’ve reached level 50, and I seem to have chosen an unwieldy approach. Thinking and feeling like this game was very similar to Fallout 4, I thought I was safe working up an explosive shotgun build. I even managed to “roll” an explosive legendary perk for my combat shotgun on the first try! However, it’s often painful having to close distance to make the shotgun useful. I find that I need more range. Maybe I could make another shotgun for “long” range use, but the whole thing feels really underpowered, even at point-blank range. What I’m noticing, in my admittedly-limited interactions with other people, is that almost no one at higher levels is using shotguns, and it seems that I should be taking the hint.

So now that I’ve leveled up through 50, and chosen all the shotgun-related perks, I find myself needing to spend the next 20 levels or so unlocking perk cards to switch to a different build setup, like commando, for automatic rifle perks. Or maybe rifleman, for single-shot? Or maybe heavy guns? I don’t know.

I see a lot of people in the servers running around at levels ~200-500. I watched a few minutes of a guy on Twitch at level 5025. Yes, I typed that correctly, and you read it correctly. Like, I literally can’t even. Every MMO has “bucket people,” I guess. These people have builds that kill anything in one or two shots, and it’s maddening to me.

To make any build viable for the hardest group content, you have to get really specific about stacking your perks, your legendary effects on armor and weapons, your mutations, your food, and then your chem buffs. Of course, getting the plans and legendaries and recipes and serums is where all the grind is.

I would guess that all MMO’s wind up breaking down like this. Ergo, to do the “best” content takes 1000 hours of grinding to get your build setup to be able to pull your weight doing group activities. I jumped into one event where there were 3 other people who had god-tier builds, and we lost out on the rewards within a minute because we were so overwhelmed. So it’s a bit different than ESO in how you group and do things, but it’s really… the same.

I couldn’t get into ESO’s “single player” experience because the base-game exploration quests were so boring. At least Fallout 76 is kind of Fallout 5, if you don’t get into the “end-game” content. But I think I’ve seen enough. My build is so whack, it’s taking 2-3 clips of ammo to kill random bugs in the world. The ammo situation is a joke, and this is certainly part of the reason why. But, hey, at least there’s no “light weaving” type of real-world-agility-check in the game.

Update

So it turns out that, really, there is a “light weaving” physical dexterity skill involved in the game, if you use a VATS-based build. I’m level 80 now, and I’ve maxed out all the perk cards for VATS-related skills. There’s trick to watching the critical meter fill up, and listening for the sound when it procs, and then hitting a different button to make your next attack a critical. Because the perks can make the meter randomly fill up at any time, there’s no set pattern to the timing. The best way to manage this is to… wait for it… slow down, just like in… ESO.

Sigh.

Fallout 76 | Our Fallout 25th Anniversary celebration concludes with interviews, events and more perks!

Fallout finishes its month-long 25th anniversary celebration strong with a spine-tingling Fallout 76 event, behind-the-scenes looks, in-game rewards and more.

Source: Fallout 76 | Our Fallout 25th Anniversary celebration concludes with interviews, events and more perks!

Buried under the lede is this gem:

Awww, yiss! My playthrough is stuck because of a bug in the unofficial patch, and I can’t finish Nuka World, i.e., the best part of the whole game. I’d be glad to start over on this edition. I’m sure “2023” means something much later than I would like, but at least we finally have a year!

Battlefield 1 Shenanigans

K/D 3

This is why I can’t get away from Battlefield. No matter how frustrating it can get, when it’s good, I think it’s the best thing in the history of video gaming. I’m usually in the top quarter of scores. I can even get in the top 5 several times a week. But I rarely actually win. The weird thing with this win is that I wasn’t trying any gimmicks. I wasn’t, say, sitting in a fortress gun for an entire round which my team dominated (and kept me safe). I was just running and gunning as support.

Horizon Forbidden West Exemplifies Bad Characterization | Extra Punctuation – YouTube

There’s an uncomfortably good point being made in this video. The literal entirety of the future of the human race is riding on Aloy. She knows this. Her friends know this. It should be imperative to all concerned that she should be kept from danger. Everyone should have helped to shoulder her burden, and forced her to accept their help, if need be, instead of allowing themselves to be sidelined, and letting her trot off into the wilderness alone.

This second game could have allowed you to play as Aloy’s friends. You could have cleared the way for her to come in, unlock this, and upload that, and generally be the DNA-gated hero she is. As her ally, maybe you could have died, and been replaced by another ally for a different chapter of the game. Maybe you could have unlocked different allies — you accumulate a whole bunch in the home base by the end — each with different abilities, and chosen who would perform each mission. Each “herald” could have had access to a subset of the skill trees, forcing you into whole new play styles throughout.

Dang.

That would have been amazing!

I hate realizations like this.

I’ve been stuck finishing the game, because I’ve just gotten bored with it. It’s just not… fun. You know? You remember, Guerrilla Games? The whole point of a video game? I want to unlock the upgrades on the few pieces of legendary-level gear I’ve managed to score, and the process is just ridiculous. Even with the difficulty turned down, and with “easy loot” turned on, trying to farm enough parts to upgrade everything turns the game into an MMO-level grind.

I’ve put the game aside, and been playing through Skyrim Anniversary Edition (the one with all the Creation Club content), and it’s been awesome. There’s enough new content mixed into the game that there are little surprises all along the way. Most of all, it’s fun. The first time I fired it up, I was grinning from ear to ear. After you start getting into the higher levels, you can have several different play styles available to you, and they all have their utility. It’s just fun to play. I guess that’s why Bethesda is still rereleasing the game after 10 years.

Vintage Gaming

So I recently refreshed my RetroPi “gaming rig.” I wanted to mark the occasion by listing some of my favorite games from each of the generations. I’m not saying that I’m a connoisseur, and have played thousands of games, and can speak definitively about which games from each platform are the best. These are just the ones I’ve come across which I thought were good.

Nintendo

  • The Legend of Zelda
  • The Legend of Zelda 2, The Adventure of Link
  • Metroid
  • Castlevania
  • Bionic Commando
  • U.S. Championship V’Ball (trust me)

Super Nintendo

  • Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Turtles in Time
  • Street Fighter 2
  • Donkey Kong Country
  • Super Metroid

It is important to note that A Link to the Past may be one of the greatest video games ever made. And I mean right up there with The Witcher 3.

Arcade

  • Defender
  • Galaga
  • Centipede
  • Dig Dug
  • Robotron
  • Tempest
  • Moon Patrol
  • Star Wars
  • Double Dragon
  • Spy Hunter
  • Tron
  • Joust
  • Golden Axe
  • Gauntlet
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
  • The Simpsons
  • X-Men
  • Captain America and The Avengers
  • 1942
  • Robocop
  • R-Type
  • Pooyan
  • Sunset Riders

DOS

  • M.U.L.E
  • Archon
  • The Bard’s Tale I, II, & III
  • Wolfenstein 3D
  • DOOM
  • Duke Nukem 3D
  • Myst
  • Quake
  • Outlaws
  • Quake II
  • Unreal Tournament
  • Descent
  • Descent II
  • Fallout
  • Fallout 2
  • Command & Conquer 2, Red Alert

You may notice that there is no Mario-related content on these lists. That’s intentional.

Gaming on a Mac, Update

We’re upgrading all the main service production computers at my church. As part of this effort, I bought 3 M1-based Mac mini’s. As an experiment, I installed Elder Scrolls Online on one of them, to see how well it would run. I expected it to be at least passable. Oh how wrong I was. It ran, and at 60 fps, but I couldn’t run it at any decent resolution. The best the game offered was 1367×768 or something. Of course, this looked like pixelated garbage on a 4K monitor. So, I consider the whole thing an abysmal failure. I’m actually glad. It’s a relief to know that a stock M1-based Mac does not, in fact, run the game amazingly, and that I’m not really missing out on this single data point with my Intel-based Mac.

Lawn Mowing Simulator’s new expansion gets medieval on your grass

Source: Lawn Mowing Simulator’s new expansion gets medieval on your grass

Lawn mowing — I prefer to call it “LARPing Qix” — has its own video game.

I was going to post some super-snarky comment about how much I hate  yard work, and therefore not being able to imagine either the desire to make a game about it, or the desire to play it, but then I remembered that I’ve been doing some fishing in ESO, despite hating it in real life, and I guess that would make me a hypocrite. In my defense, fishing in ESO is the only way to farm one of the most valuable commodities in the game, and, done in particular ways, can get you achievements, and any time there’s a two-for-one deal in a video game, I’m in.

Valve’s Gabe Newell hints at vague console plans coming “this year” | Ars Technica

Or maybe Newell was suggesting that Valve plans to revive its Steam Machines program, getting behind a line of SteamOS-powered living room consoles once more. Given the quick market death of that effort, though, this is probably the least likely bit of speculation at the moment.

Source: Valve’s Gabe Newell hints at vague console plans coming “this year” | Ars Technica

I think that Valve will, indeed, make a serious go at a console, running SteamOS (née, Linux), and I think the launch will coincide with the reveal of Half-Life Episode 3. I think they’ve been sitting on that pent-up demand to launch their console. I just think they had no idea they’d be sitting on it for 13 years and counting, now.

UPDATE: I just stumbled across a recent talk by Linus Torvalds, where he points out that he is already on record that Valve might be the one organization that could make “Linux on the desktop” a reality, because they will be obstinate about making a distribution that doesn’t make ABI-breaking package updates every few months. It looks like SteamOS is being updated — about once a year, but that sounds suspiciously as if plans to produce a proper SteamOS-based device has been discussed with him. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking. I’m very happy with my PS5, but I would love to see a Valve console come to market, for a lot of reasons.